59 out of 59 people found this review helpful.
ATI TV Wonder VE and XP: An Oil and Water Mix!
Date of Review: Nov 28, 2002
The Bottom Line: As in life, there's no guarantees. This product may make your head swim after several hours of playing with compatibility issues and Windows XP.
The thought of being able to watch TV on my desktop intrigued me enough to go out and spring for a TV Tuner card ($30). This plus the fact that I could record programming for future viewing or to archive.
What's in the Box
The TV Wonder card, audio cable and adapter, software, manual.
Requirements
Intel Pentium II/III/4, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP*
An ATI, 3dfx, S3, or Nvidia video card, or any card which supports overlay.
(*through driver download)
Also my TV card is NTSC compatible and carries a UL Listing.
My Configuration
Windows XP, 512 MB RAM, Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400, onboard VIA AC㥩 audio.
Installation and Setup
Installing the PCI card, the audio cable from the TV card to the Line-In on the sound card and the CATV wire install was straightforward. The software installation however is not.
If you're running XP, I suggest downloading the updated drivers from ATI along with their updated Media Center MC before starting your system. Currently I'm using version 7.1. I've also tested v7.6 beta.
What's very strange is the drivers would not install from the ATI package, but had to be manually installed from the Device Manager in XP. This is only if you installed a previous version of the MC. I count no less than 8 drivers which had to be installed in this manner.
As expected, Windows XP recognized the ATI card on startup and was directed it to the new set of drivers for XP. After several unsuccessful attempts to get a few drivers to work properly, it was up and running and now time to fire up the MC.
Features
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Capture stills of the current display to the gallery.
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The surf option is on of my favorites. It displays a tiny thumbnail of each channel across the current screen size (72 channels at 800 x 600). Click once on a channel of interest and it pauses for a predetermined amount of time. Double-click and it goes to that channel.
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TV Magazine is another neat feature where it captures the closed captioning and takes video stills and saves them to HTML for later viewing. It does a pretty good job of removing advertising also. Also a hot words feature that will start your capture. For example, use Microsoft as the hot word and if the word is mentioned in the broadcast, your magazine recording will begin.
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The controls are what you'd expect from a regular TV. Up, down channel, mute, and a parental lock feature. The channels can be changed by typing them in on your keyboard.
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Fullscreen by itself or as a video desktop replacing your current wallpaper.
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Zoom in on the display by clicking and dragging your mouse. Why would you want to do this? I don't know. ;)
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The ability to capture video from other sources such as a camcorder or VCR.
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Record at DVD to VCD quality, or a custom setting such as Windows WMV format. Supports real-time MPEG-2 compression. The recording quality is quite good at the higher quality settings as you would expect, but the price to pay is storage consumption. At VCD quality an hour recording consumes about 600 MB. The same hour at the highest quality (DVD) can consume about 3.5 GB! Ouch!
Guide Plus
One of the neat features included with the software is Guide Plus . In case you're not familiar, it's a utility similar to those found on VCRs or TVs. It aids in the recording of TV programming by automatically setting your VCR to record and stop at a specific time. So in this case my system would be a Personal Video Recorder much like TiVo or Replay TV. Well almost.
Here are some of the features incorporated in this software:
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One touch recording
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7 days of TV listings for the local broadcast or cable channels in the US and Canada.
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Search for programming using filters.
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Sorted listings by TITLE, channel, actor or actress, a specific category (sports, news etc).
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And of course, a weekly crossword puzzle downloaded with your listings.
If it weren't for this program, I most likely would have dumped this product. But I enjoy the convenience of recording programs for later viewing on my computer, or burning them to CD-RW for viewing on my DVD player.
You'll need to download updated programming at least every 3 days or up to 7 days. With a dial-up I'd go with 3 days since the download is quite large and their server isn't exactly the fastest.
Also I suggest downloading the update to Guide Plus . It's not automatic, but as to be initiated from the GUIDE PLUS System Update Wizard.
Gripes (and there's plenty)
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First of all I would have never purchased this card if there wasn't XP or Nvidia support. I verified this through their web site.
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This is a major gripe. When starting the TV from the desktop or through the MC, the video looks as though it needs a horizontal adjustment. (remember the good old days?). This would happen 100% of the time. The strange thing is it will record normally.
So off I went researching for a fix and what I found surprised me. ATI was not only aware of the problem, but included some pretty lame workarounds. For one, they say to update the driver to the card and video card along with a bunch of other generic solutions that just about every company uses. One trick that did work for about 3 weeks was pressing the Ctrl or Shift key when starting the program. Ok, but as soon as you record, off it went doing the horizontal bop! The recording was fine, but you couldn't watch it as it was recording. Ok, no big deal I guess. I only record if I'm away from my TV.
Today as I write this, I'm on fix #2. And that is another ATI workaround. Get this! While the TV is playing, change your bit depth from 16 to 32 bit or vice versa! It works 90% of the time. The other 10% I'm swearing ATI up and down! ;)
Ok, maybe it's a bad card? I boot into Windows 98 SE on the same machine and it works perfectly. I remove the card and install it into another XP machine with similar results as the original XP install. This machine has an ATI Rage Pro card and meets all the requirements.
A compatibility problem with XP and not hardware is my guess. So is it XP's fault? Or the fault of ATI advertising it's compatible with this OS?
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Their tech support, well, sucks to be honest. I finally got a return e-mail after 2 weeks and all it did was direct me to the troubleshooting site I visited earlier. Telephone support was just as helpful. Get your questions answered before 30 days or plan on spending $1.95 per minute.
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Be careful what you install from the MC installation. Their player and VCD player will hijack settings causing a raucous when trying to open files in Media Player.
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In the help file (which is nicely organized), you'll see references to a feature called TV-On-Demand. This is the ability to record a program and rewind and watch it while still recording. Well, forget about it! It's not included in the software and obviously for another TV card.
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Still capture has a yellow tint and very ugly.
Overall
If this card worked as advertised, it would be carrying 5 stars. But when a product does not perform as expected, I'm disappointed. If it were minor gripes I could excuse that. But having to go through a series of color depth settings just to watch TV just doesn't cut it.
I would not recommend this product to anyone with Windows XP unless you're assured that you can return the product, or can live with the problem outlined above. Or if you plan on upgrading your OS keep in mind that your investment may not be functional on your new system. In fact, as I look through the ATI newsgroups, I see various problems with not only XP, but 98 through 2000 as well.
Shame on me for not researching this resource methodically beforehand.
